I’m confused about the Chinese character 子 . (I hope that shows up.) I believe it’s written as zi3 in Pinyin, and it’s 0xD7D3 in Unicode. It’s “ko” in Japanese and tu (tử) in Vietnamese.
I think this is the character added to the names of great men as Tzu or Tsu, right? E.g. Lao Tzu, Sun Tzu, and probably Confuscious as well, since he’s Khong Tu (Không Tử) in Vietnamese. However, this same character means child, and it’s mostly used for women’s names in Japanese, e.g. Kimiko, Sachiko. Why is that? Why does the same character mean both honored man and child? It also seems to mean fruit, but that’s probably a coincidence.
IANANS*, but the pinyin for that character is indeed “zi” [ but generally without a tone]. It has no definite meaning; its something of an article added to words to distinguish them from others (it usually identifies nouns, but not always). It most certainly does not necessarily denote great men. The word “table,” for example, is “zhuo zi.”
In Chinese, it’s used in a ton of words, and it appears to almost be some sort of derivational suffix or something, but I’m not sure what it signifies. Its function appears, to this naïve third year Chinese student, to be essentially grammatical, but I’m not sure exactly what that function is.
I’m not even a non-native speaker, but I’m pretty sure pinyin always includes the tone. Maybe you mean it should be the level tone. However, that would be written as zi1, and that’s not represented as 子 , at least not according to the dictionaries I can find.
I can’t read that Japanese site, but “teacher” makes sense. Still the dictionary defintion shows a number of meanings, but not “teacher”. However, it also doesn’t show fruit, and I know I’ve seen that character used to distinguish, for example, a peach from a peach flower. I’ve heard it’s only used with native, as opposed to imported, fruits though.
Well, actually, in Mandarin Chinese “zi” has two pronunciations. First is third tone and primary meaning is “son”, followed by other secondary meanings like “seed.”
Second pronunciation is fourth tone, where it is a noun and suffix. Examples would be house/fangzi 房子 or automobile/chezi 车子.
It can be pronounced in the neutral tone, but this basic Chinese pronunciation guidelines (fourth tone following a third tone is generally neutral).
All that said, Stark Raven Mad nailed it: it’s a type of honorific.
Keep in mind that this is a duoyinzi 多音字 or something that sounds the same but is a different character/meaning. Third tone and fourth tone - different word but same character. As I wrote earlier dumpling/baozi would be noun and suffix.
The main reason it’s a suffix in so many cases is to di-syllablicize the word like baozi. BTW, di-syllabicize is a pretty Chinese language student specific terminology word (spell it correctly and use it on your chinese prof). Because Chinese is tonal, and so many single syllable words sound similar, Chinese put together two syllables to remove confusion as to the word in reference. For example, baozi is a dumpling, but if you said “bao” using the same character 包, then it could be a package or a dumpling. Whereas, baozi has to be dumpling. Another example would be “to walk” or zou 走. Spoken Mandarin you’ll generally hear “walk on the road” zoulu 走路. Zuo has a lot of similar words, whereas zoulu is very exact.
I’m not a Chinese linguist, but possibly originated as body parts like nose/bizi鼻子. Over time extended the meaning to inanimate objects.
In the case of Laozi and Kongzi, et al, it’s an honorific and not used to di-syllabacize the word.
As a third year Chinese student, you should be getting into the absolutely maddening way that Chinese can be terribly inexact. Part of that whole low context cultural language thing that typifies Chinese. Get to China and travel around - and you’ll be astounded at the way Chinese actually speak. Wait until you go to Beijing to hear how the natives really speak “textbook” Mandarin. bwahahahahahaha
Note that the Japanse and Korean version don’t neccessarily have much to do with the Chinese one anymore. It’s been way too long since it was introduced.
Well, that’s a bit better, but it still doesn’t show up for me. I see the t, but the next letter, which should be a u, with a little hook on it and a question mark above, just appears as a square. Can anyone else see it?
Interesting. What you call the Chinese neutral tone sounds to me like the Vietnamese sixth tone, usually translated as “low glottal stop”. To me, the Chinese first tone sounds more neutral. Why does this “bonus” tone in Chinese get described that way?
Make sure you have the correct language packs installed. Tell me what OS you’re using, and I can help you figure it out. I have XP, and for me it’s a matter of checking a couple options in the Regional and Language control panel.
No, it’s not a big deal. Vietnamese works for me on every site but here. I’m glad to know other people can see though. I’m using Windows 2000 at work, but I have XP at home, so maybe I’ll take a look tonight.
The “neutral” tone is also described as the lack of a tone - it’s a way of describing what seem to me at least phonetically equivalent to unstressed syllables in English. Rather than the noticeably high first tone, it’s pronounced in the center of the speaking range, and syllables in the neutral tone are shorter, even elided in fast speech.
With some Chinese speakers I’ve heard, the third tone dips low enough that there’s some creaky voice sometimes, but this tone has a definite contour: falling and then rising.
